Chapter 6: The Disc
Elizabeth burst into the facility’s dining room where Sam, Steve, Rose, and Wade were having breakfast.  She threw the disc she had been examining for the last several days onto the table.
“All right, are you guys messing with me, or what?”
“What are you talking about?” said Wade.
“Every time I look at that disc, it has different symbols on it.  Sometimes it’s demotic, sometimes, it’s cuneiform, sometimes it’s Norse runes, and some of them just look like squiggles.  Now, are you guys sneaking into my room and changing discs on me?”
“I know I’m not,” said Rose, “and it would be easiest for me.”
“There aren’t any other discs like that, at least that we know of,” said Steve.  “Trust me, nobody is trying to put one over on you.”
“Hell, why would we try to fool you?” said Sam.  “You’re supposed to be our expert on this stuff.”
“Well, if you aren’t doing anything, then the only other possibility is that it’s changing on its own.  And that means I can’t really help you here.”  Elizabeth slumped down between Steven and Rose.
“You can’t?” said Rose.
“Hey, I’m a scientist.  You guys are the magic experts.  I can’t decipher a message that keeps changing on me.  How do you even analyze a magic thing?  Do you have any, I don’t know, magical lab gear or anything?”
“If they do, they’ve hidden it from me,” said Steven.
“You don’t really analyze magic,” said Wade.  “All you can do is try it and see, after taking the proper precautions, of course.  If you could analyze it, it would be called science.”
“Well, how do I try it?” said Elizabeth.  “It doesn’t have an on button or anything.”
“We figured the engravings would have something to do with that,” said Rose.  “Artifacts that old that need spoken commands usually have the command written down somewhere.  You mean you can’t read them at all?”
“Well, I suppose I could,” said Elizabeth, “but the symbols I understand don’t make any kind of sense.  It’s like whoever engraved them didn’t really understand how language works.  There’s no grammar or anything.  And like I said, the symbols are different every time I look at them.”
“Maybe they’re changing at specific times,” said Steven.  “The way you activate the disc might be based on time somehow.  I can set up a camera to record when it is that the markings change.  Maybe there’s a pattern there.”
“Good idea,” said Elizabeth.  
Sam finished his breakfast and rose from the table.  “Okay, Steve, you guys go ahead and take care of that.  I’ll be downstairs.”
Steven finished the rest of his food in a hurry.  “I’m going to take the disc to our lab and get that camera set up, Elizabeth.  You go ahead and get yourself something to eat.  I can’t remember the last time I saw you in here.”
Elizabeth got herself a plate of eggs and sausage.  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, either, and she couldn’t keep ignoring the smell.  “So what kind of magic do you use to get fresh cooked eggs every morning?” she said as she started attacking a sausage.
“Something we call a stove,” said Wade.
“Although the magic does help,” said Rose.  “Turns out that telekinesis is a great way to keep from ruining a yolk.”
“Oh, by the way, what’s downstairs?”
“Combat training room,” said Steven.  “It’s psychically shielded, so Sam won’t be distracted by any of us by accident.  He’s been trying to practice his fighting technique so he doesn’t need to read someone’s mind to know where they are.”
“Do you think he’d mind if I watched?”  Rose and Wade gave each other a look.
“Probably not.  Besides, there’s a control booth that’s outside the shield, so he can’t tell if anyone’s in there or not.  He says it helps keep the training spontaneous if one of us goes down there and surprises him with something.”
“Is that so?” said Elizabeth.  
As she finished her breakfast, she tried to keep her face neutral, but the others didn’t need to be psychic to know what was on her mind.
After breakfast, Elizabeth went to the lab to help Steven set up the camera.  He programmed a computer to make a note of the time whenever it saw the disc inscription changing.  It wasn’t a complicated piece of programming, and Elizabeth was soon on her way down to the training room.  She sat in the small viewing booth and watched Sam at work.
It was a pretty neat system that, apparently, Steven had set up for Sam.  Around the center of the room was a ring of targets.  Each one had a buzzer, so Sam could home in on the sound, and a red light, so an onlooker could tell which target Sam was supposed to be aiming for.  The targets would buzz and light up in a random sequence, and as soon as Sam had poked the tip of his cane into the target, the buzzer would stop and a new one would go off.  Occasionally, two targets would go off, one with a buzzer and a red light and one with a more pleasant tone and a blue light.  The blue targets gave off a nasty squeal when Sam tagged them, but Elizabeth only found that out later, since Sam never tagged one of them.  Apparently, they were supposed to represent a friendly target, like the civilians that inexplicably ran out in front of your gun in shooter arcade games.
She watched him spin around in the center of the circle, stabbing targets with near pinpoint precision.  She also noticed that he wasn’t wearing his long coat for this training, just a white undershirt that left little of his musculature to the imagination.  Sure, he was no bodybuilder, but his six-pack was clearly visible beneath the fabric of the shirt.  Elizabeth had to admit to herself that Sam really looked damn good.  She found herself wishing that she worked out a little more.
This was not to say that Elizabeth was at all out of shape.  She did go swimming regularly, after all.  On the other hand, she did often dive in fairly cold water, and a decent layer of blubber helped her stay warm, even in the balmy Mediterranean.  Besides, when she was out in the field, she usually ate the same garbage that her students ate, which amounted to a lot of fast food, and she had an academic’s approach to most of her lifestyle, which meant that if it wasn’t at least five hundred years old, it didn’t interest her much.
This was also why she hadn’t dated anyone for the longest time.  It was hard to maintain a relationship when your job required you to spend so much time on the other side of the world.  And all the men she met with as much interest in archaeology as she had were usually old enough to be her father.
However, she hadn’t met a man before who had saved her life, either.
Sam’s cane started to move faster.  She could see his face tightening up, as if this was no longer a physical exercise for him.  At the beginning, he had seemed to be calculating each and every swipe of his cane, but now his mind seemed to be taking a back seat to his emotion.  He wasn’t thinking about the targets anymore.  Elizabeth thought back to what the others had told her about how Sam’s wife had died, the woman that Sam had mistaken her for back at the pier.  In her mind’s eye, she could see men in place of the targets.  She could imagine wave after wave of them being chopped into still-living bits as Sam fought to avenge the woman he loved.
When the last target had been struck, Sam let his arms fall limp to his sides.  He staggered over to where his coat lay on the floor of the training room.  He fished through the folds of cloth and pulled out a light blue angora scarf.  Elizabeth watched him run the scarf across his face, holding it to his nose so he could breathe it in.  
“He’s getting better,” said Steven from behind Elizabeth.
“What?”  Elizabeth spun around, startled.
“He usually falters a bit when the friendlies pop up.  This time, he just breezed by them.  It’s like he’s more focused this time.”
“Does he always keep that scarf on him?”
“Usually.”
“It was hers, wasn’t it?”
“Yep.  He likes to keep it around as a memento.  You know, he tells everyone that he’s fine, but we all know better.  You never really get over something like that.”
Elizabeth went back to her room.  She had a closet with a full-length mirror next to it, and she took a good look at herself for the first time.  She had never really cared about her figure.  She thought she looked good enough, but academics just weren’t really expected to look like fashion models in her world.  She was built for swimming, not strutting.  After seeing Sam’s build, though, she found herself running her hands over her belly and wondering if the little bit of extra fat there was really necessary.
Slowly, she began to notice a slight movement beneath her hands.  As she looked at her profile in the mirror, she could see her hands moving slightly inwards.  Her pants began to hang just a little bit lower on her hips.  She also felt her shirt begin to tighten until a narrow strip of her midsection was visible.  Her brassiere didn’t quite seem to fit anymore, either.
She thought back in a panic to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.  Yeah, her clothes had fit loosely but comfortable this morning.  Now her shirt was skintight around her bust and her belt was one notch too loose.  She stepped into the bathroom to weigh herself.  Sure enough, she had just watched herself lose five pounds in as many seconds.
She ran from her room and found Rose on the phone.  “Yeah, understood.  Can I call you back in a bit?  All right, see you later.”  She hung up the phone.  “What’s up, Elizabeth?”
“Rose, I think I found out something about the disc.”
“What’s that?”
Elizabeth pulled the waist of her jeans away from herself.  “These pants fit me a minute ago.”
Rose looked at her wide-eyed for a moment, and then she called into the next room.  “Wade?  Get Sam and Steve.”
A few minutes later, the five of them were gathered in Steven’s lab.  Steven brought out a steel bar with a wire leading to a small sensor.  “All right, Elizabeth, I need you to grab this handle, and I’ll attach the pad to your wrist.”
“What is this thing?” she said as Steven attached the sensor to the inside of her wrist, overlapping the artery.  
“Remember when we were talking about equipment to analyze a magical object?”
“Yeah, you said there wasn’t any.”
“Well, this device measures the magical energy of a person, like an EKG.”  He pressed a few keys on his keyboard, and several line graphs appeared on the screen on the wall.  “This line along the bottom represents a normal person without any magical abilities, specifically me.  The one in the middle is Sam’s level, for a person who acquired magical abilities through artificial means, and the one on top is Wade, because he was born with his abilities.  Now squeeze on the handle a few times, and I’ll tell you when to stop.”
She squeezed the metal bar, and it gave a faint tingle like it was vibrating.  After a few seconds, a new line appeared on the graph.  It didn’t follow quite the same path, but it was nonetheless at the same level as Sam’s.
“Just as I thought,” said Steven.  “You spent so much time hunched over that disc that it’s given you some magical juice of your own.”
“You mean I can cut people in half, too?”
“No,” said Wade, “something like this is usually limited to one specific area.  In this case, it looks like basic transformation.  You’re already able to make basic changes to your own body shape.  With practice and training, you might be able to change yourself into whatever you wanted.”
“You might be able to change other people or objects, too,” said Rose.
Elizabeth looked down at herself.  “Wait a minute.  What if I mess up?  What if I can’t change back to normal, or I change into something that can get me killed?”
“Oh, we’ll work with you,” said Wade.
“Do you even remember how to learn how to use magic like this?” said Steven.  “You’ve been living with it for a long time, Wade.  You might have forgotten some of the stuff that would be complicated for a beginner.”  Elizabeth was starting to detect some undertones in their meaning.
“You know, he’s right,” said Rose.  “She should have something helping her who’s had something similar happen to them.”
Everyone turned to look at Sam.  
Elizabeth looked at everyone’s faces.  They were all smiling a little.  She turned to look at Sam.  He started to go red.
Oh.  Awkward.